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For three weeks now, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has been shaken by a wave of student protests against the neoliberalization of higher education and the lack of democratic accountability in internal decision-making. Last week, UvA staff joined the rebellion, declaring...

Modern industrial capitalism is based on a simple premise, writes Derrick Jensen: our mother Earth is a great store of raw materials for us to pillage, and a vast trashcan for our endless volumes of waste, no matter how long-lived and deadly. How can this be changed? First we...

Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist...

Despite the countless grassroots projects already under way, the global economic juggernaut can seem too powerful to stop. But because more and more of us are becoming aware of how disastrous the global economy is for people and the planet, I believe that the chances for...

When we talk about saving the world, what world are we talking about? Not the globe itself, obviously. But also not the biological world—the world of life. The world of life, strangely enough, is not in danger (though thousands and perhaps even millions of species are). Even...

This is an excerpt from Beyond Civilization, pages 109-118. Read more here or you can check your local bookstore to buy a print copy.
People have lived many different ways on this planet, but about ten thousand years ago there appeared one people who believed everyone in the...

At first I thought… The most powerful thing that you can do for your people, your future, your land, your air, your water is to fight and die for what you believe in. But it’s not true… you have to LIVE for what you believe in.
So begins the wise words of 13-year old...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Tariq Ali is part of the royalty of the left. His more than 20 books on politics and history, his seven novels, his screenplays and plays and his journalism in the Black Dwarf newspaper, the New Left Review and other publications have made him one of the...

In a recent semi-documentary film called Garbage, a toxic waste disposal engineer was asked how we can stop engulfing the world in our poisons. His answer was, "We'd have to remove everybody from the face of the earth, because humans GENERATE toxic waste, whether it be...

In the UK, an insidious secret network of violent extremists is plotting to subvert democracy. The members of this network detest our way of life, and hate our freedoms. Walking amongst us, this dangerous fifth column is exploiting the very laws we hold dear to campaign for...

A few days ago in Stockholm I was walking by the water and was accosted by a youngish man from Ireland who shouted out my name. This is not something that happens to me often - apparently he is among that small subset of humanity that has read my book  so I took this...

Perhaps the most redeeming aspect of my father’s ministry was his tireless work to help people heal from guilt and shame. I saw the transformative impact that his efforts had on people’s lives as they built the strength to lay down years of resentment and bitterness, and...

Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.
When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and...

The lead-up to an election is a tough time to be an anarchist. There's always someone wagging a patronising finger and telling you that your, or their, or someone's grandparents died for your 'right' to submit agency over your life to someone who also claims to represent...

So one particular night I went on a knowledge binge and spent 9 hours reading about privilege theory. Below you'll find excerpts and links to most of the articles I read.
My extremely brief conclusion is that PT is definitely helpful to understand and is useful up to a...

Feedback from my lecture at the Green Party annual meeting has been trickling in, and it seems that the talk wasn’t as well-received as I thought at the time. The people who walked out in the first five minutes – maybe they didn’t have to go to the bathroom after all, as I’d...

Last weekend I decided I would get the kids outdoors for a little time in nature. The Susquehanna River was frozen over, with the most remarkable ice formations. Even though the water is not deep in this part of the river, ice somehow piled up several feet. The photograph...

This round-up features Films For Action's picks for best activist film of 2014, most of which can be watched for free online. Our favorites for the year are at the top of the list.
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Martin Luther King Jr. exemplifies real bravery in "Selma."
Well, you can beat on your chest / Hell, any monkey can. —Bruce Springsteen, “Real Man”
In an essay on Theodore Roosevelt, Gore Vidal classified the former president and known tough guy as an “American sissy.” He...

This is an excerpt from The One Idea That Saves the World: A Call to Conscience and A Call to Action by Laurence Overmire.
The House is on Fire.
The people in the house are
Sleeping and in great danger
Seven of their neighbors will come along
Each with an opportunity to...

Would any sane PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around...

Editor's note: Thandeka wrote this in 1999, but her analysis and contribution to the discussion on anti-racism remains as relevent to today as ever. She addressed this to Unitarian Universalists, but you can read it pretending she's addressing middle-class liberals; it works...

Jay Tiernan, a leader in the fight to stop the killing of wild badgers in England, has received a six month suspended jail sentence and up to $83,000 in fines for breaching a court order brought by cattle farmers who support the “badger cull.” According to The Guardinan...

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."
The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years — his last...

I have mixed emotions about Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For me, it’s a time of hopeful celebration — but also of cautionary vigilance. I celebrate an extraordinary man of courage and conviction and his remarkable achievements and hope that I can behave in a manner that honors...

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Democracy is dead. It has always been an afflicted creature - hobbling about - wounded at its very being. An enslaving...

In this 50th anniversary year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act it helped inspire, national media will focus on the iconic images of “Bloody Sunday,” the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the interracial marchers, and President Lyndon Johnson...

The ‘Robin Hood of the Banks’ strikes again. This time the aim is to create a worldwide cooperative to develop and expand a new economy of the commons.
Some revolutionary activists have an amazing ability to avoid the economy. We have been iron-branded with the idea that...

The attack on Charlie Hebdo is the worst case of targeted killings of journalists ever recorded in Europe and is matched only by the massacre five years ago of 32 journalists and other media workers, by 100 armed men who attacked an election convoy in Mindanao in the...

In 2011, TIME Magazine selected “the protester” as its person of the year. Perhaps “person of the decade” would have been a more accurate depiction.
We live in tumultuous times. Since 2011, every year seems to have brought more protests, more rebellions, more uprisings —...

For brutal wannabe fascists like police union thugs, for liberal authoritarian politicians like President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and most big city mayors, for media talking head like CNN's Don Lemon, and for weaseling civil rights spokesleaders eager to throw...

It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer...

“The police union chief instructed his members to impose a martial law-type policing regime on the city.”
When Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has the blood of two dead cops on his hands, he was issuing a physical threat...

While recent protests have focused on the deaths of black men, it's black women who are leading the charge.
Producer Jihan Hafiz followed young black women in Washington, D.C., as they organize and build their movement. And while their targets are police brutality and...

It’s kind of fitting that police officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, murderers of Mike Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York, were cleared of criminal wrong-doing in the last several weeks. The eruption of protest, activism and organizing in response to the...

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them…Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being...

"An eye for an eye is not our vision of justice," declared #BlackLivesMatter in a statement released Sunday
A declaration by the New York Police Department Union that it will engage in "wartime policing" in response to Saturday's killing of two city law enforcement...

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an...

​Travellers on a site near Exeter are now officially squatting the land they've been living on for 13 years.
The New Traveller site on Haldon Hill, dubbed "Middle Tree" by the people who live there, has been tolerated by authorities since its foundation. However, all that's...

As occupying public spaces was to the Occupy movement, “Shutting It Down” is to the new wave of protest around police brutality and systemic racism. “If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down” has long been a favorite chant of the labor movement, but for the rapidly growing movement...

The nascent movement against racist police brutality in the US received a boost of energy from the non-indictment of Eric Garner's murderers in blue. Thousands filled the streets from New York City to Berkeley, California to protest racist injustice and...

“This movement-in-the-making has no choice but to challenge the very legitimacy of the State and its armed organs of coercion.”
After decades of misleader-induced lethargy and quietude, Black America is finally in motion – or, at the very least, earnestly seeking ways to...

Editors Note: Last week, YES! magazine published an article by Fania Davis, director of a restorative justice center and sister of civil rights activist Angela Davis, called “This Country Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process on Violence Against African Americans—Right...

You and I constitute the very system that we blame for the world’s problems, which is starkly illustrated at Christmas when we rob our fragile earth on the high streets in the name of Jesus. What better way to celebrate the birth of Christ this year than to unite under the...

No Logo author Naomi Klein says we must revolutionise our working lives if we are to combat climate change and save the free world...
Imagine an ordinary, full-time working week, one that requires just 21 hours of hard graft. Imagine a less frantic existence – three days...

We are two students -- one black, one white -- at Union Theological Seminary, an institution historically and presently committed to fighting against injustice through faith and action. We were outraged by the non-indictment in the case of Eric Garner, which is only the most...

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us how to relax the bonds of anger, attachment and delusion through mindfulness and kindness toward ourselves.
To be happy, to me, is to suffer less. If we were not capable of transforming the pain within ourselves, happiness would not be...

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